and central across southern and central scotland, and into northern england, with the potential for heavier showers further south tomorrow as well, heavier than today with a risk of thunder as well, so a very u nsettled of thunder as well, so a very unsettled weekend. this is bbc news, i'm lukwesa burak, the headlines at three: the energy watchdog demands an explanation from national grid after nearly one million people across england and wales lost power on friday. the electricity provider says it will learn lessons. what we saw was an exceptionally rare event that we have not seen since 2008, but we will be looking very ha rd since 2008, but we will be looking very hard at what happened to make sure we minimise disruption in the future. the us financierjeffrey epstein, whose acquaintances included president trump and prince andrew, is found dead in his prison cell in new york while awaiting trial

on sex trafficking charges. wet and windy conditions cause disruption to travellers, with the west coast main line hit by flooding. michael gove says there'll be a bail—out fund hello, this is bbc news, i'm lukwesa burak. the headlines: the energy watchdog demands an explanation from national grid after nearly one million people across england and wales lost power on friday — the electricity provider says it will learn lessons from the incident.

what we saw yesterday evening was an exceptionally rare event, one we have not seen since 2008, but we will be looking very hard at what happened to make sure that we minimise disruption in future. us media reports suggest that financierjeffrey epstein has been found dead in his prison cell while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. michael gove says there'll be a bail—out fund for businesses hit by brexit. the family of a 15—year—old girl missing in malaysia thank the search teams who are scouring the jungle for her. more than a million people are evacuated from their homes as a powerful typhoon hits china. now on bbc news, the acclaimed african—american writer toni morrison died this week at the age of 88. in 2014, razia iqbal interviewed her at the hay festival in a special edition of talking books.

i'm razia iqbal, and i'm at hay festival for a special talking books programme with toni morrison. she is the last american writer to have won the nobel prize for literature. that was in 1993. she remains, though, a towering figure in literature. from herfirst book, the bluest eye, about an african—american girl who wants blue eyes, to her crowning achievement, beloved, about the impact of 200 years of slavery. she has always written out of the experience of being an african—american woman, yet her writing has become emblematic of an essential aspect of american reality. i would like to start by talking about definitions —

how you have been defined, and how you define yourself. i know it probably matters less now, but when you first started out writing, you quite consciously wanted to define yourself as an african—american woman writer. why was that? those days, the early days, when i began to write, i got compliments from other writers about the value and the beauty, perhaps, of the book, and in order to elevate my reputation, i remember being at an author's event, and i think it was doctorow who said, "toni morrison is a wonderful writer. "i don't think of her as a woman writer, i don't think "of her as an african—american

writer, i think of her as" — and he paused — "a white male writer". laughter. so the categories we were being put in. so i claimed it. "yes, i am a black woman writer." whatever that means. as i continued writing, the problem became the gaze, the white gaze, that was always present in so many books by african—americans. men on the whole, like james baldwin, richard wright, ralph ellison. yes, they were not writing to me, and i always used to use the title of ralph ellison's book, which i love, by the way, because it is extraordinary, but the title set me back a little, because it was the invisible man, and i thought, "invisible to whom?"

to them, you know. so it was like even the best of the slave narratives were addressed to the readers — they were always assumed to be white people, and not black people. so i was determined not to do that. where did that certainty come from, that you felt so rooted in the perspective that you wanted to write from before you even articulated the notion of the white gaze, and not being interested in the white gaze? there were two things. one was the kind of books being written at that time in the late ‘60s by black men. not the big novelists, but, you know, the revolutionaries. it was always to the man, you know. screw the man, or whatever. "black is beautiful."

i was saying, "what? what is that about? "wait a minute. "before we get on the black is beautiful thing, may i remind you "of what it was like before? "when it was not beautiful, when it was lethal to consider "yourself ugly, not human, other?" and so the bluest eye was my answer to that sudden leap into perfection and power and so on, as though there was no history that preceded it. this was your first novel, written when you were an editor at random house in the 1970s. the impulse was notjust the historical context, but a particular incident, an anecdote. a friend of yours who wanted blue eyes — an african—american

girl who wanted blue eyes. two things happened. i was walking along with her. her name was eunice. we were very close. schoolgirls. ten or ii, i think. we were discussing whether god existed, and i said he did, of course. she said, "no, no, there is no god". i asked her how she knew, and she said, "i have been praying "for blue eyes for two years, "and i don't have them." laughter. when i looked at her, i thought two things. if he had answered her prayers, it would be grotesque. she would look awful. and also, i recognised beauty for the first time. that she was really beautiful, and that was not a ten or 12—year—old word in connection with your girlfriend or anything. so when i began the bluest eye,

i used that anecdote in what she must have been thinking, how desperate she was to be other, to be white or to have some characteristic that would set her apart. was there also a sense that you wanted to write a story that didn't exist, that there was a silence of that perspective? oh, yeah. i wanted to read that book, and i couldn't find it. i thought maybe if i looked hard enough, somebody had written a story about those things — to put a young black child centre stage without making fun of her. she's not any of these cliched things. i thought somebody probably was writing that book or would write it. no—one did. i was eager to read it, and i didn't think i could read it unless i wrote it. all of my books have been like that.

they are reading experiences for me, as well as writing. how did you manage to write it, being an editor and having a full—time job as an editor of books, including books by black writers? you know, we multitask. laughter. i had two children. i'm in new york city. i had left graduate school many years ago, taught in universities, went other places, and finally landed this job at random house. but still there was this other thing that i wanted to do, so i sort of published it... this sounds silly, but it was sort of secret. i didn't tell anybody at the publishing house that i had written this book. did you tell anyone at all? did you tell friends that you were writing? no. i had a friend who was an editor

at holt, and he had published a book by someone whom i knew who had actually been a student of mine, and he wrote manchild in the promised land, and he said, "why don't you give your manuscript too?" idid. i had sent it around a little bit and got 12 rejections. some were letters, some were little postcards, but no. so when i gave it to this man, i don't know if he liked it, but there were african—american writers coming along, so he took it. i didn't tell anybody at random house. 0n the first edition, i wrote three flaps, which are like three sentences. my bio is not there. i put on the jacket — this is really bad news — the first page of the book, which i thought, "well, i've written this book.

"if you look at it in the book store, " you start reading it on the cover". i thought that was very clever. but it doesn't display, you can't see it from afar. so i've not done it since. but that was a little bit of a secret. then at random, they didn't hire me to be a writer, they hired me to be an editor, so i was doing two things. they suggested i talk to some people to see whether i wanted to work there, and i remember the man who is my editor now saying, "look, if you are going to work as an editor, i will have to be able to fire you". isaid, "uh—huh". he said, "if you work as a writer, i will take you on". so it all worked out.

i did quite a lot of research for this interview. one of the things i found out was that the new york times book review didn't give the bluest eye a particularly good review. i think it was kind of 0k. i don't think they thought it was great. now, they describe you as the closest thing america has to a national writer. i had one good review from john leonard, and it wasn't in the new york times. the new york times, i think one of them said, "i think she writes "this wayjust to avoid cliche". yes. laughter. but more demoralising than that was the reception i got from african—american critics. they did not like the book at all. it was, you know,

incest and children. they were horrified by it, and let me know it. how did that make you feel, given that you were quite consciously defining yourself as writing out of that experience? i didn't anticipate the venom. i thought they probably would be upset because i was talking about us in very real, visceral way, and it wasn't a happy story. it wasn't, "oh, i was a slave, and i got free and here i am". it was feminine too. it wasn't a man writing these things. i anticipated hostility, but i didn't know how deep and how profound they hated the idea of it.

they didn't even think about whether it was well—written. it was about something that was, you know, embarrassing, shameful et cetera. yourfirst three books — the bluest eye, sula, song of solomon — none of them have any white characters in them at all. the white world is there. it is a presence. it is an oppression, if you like. i wonder if i can take you back to your childhood to try to understand where that perspective comes from. you grew up in lorain, ohio, and experienced institutionalised segregation as a child. where did your sense of your identity as an african—american girl come from? did it come more from your mother, your father, your grandparents? because all of them had different perspectives on the white world, didn't they?

i didn't experience a black neighbourhood or segregation at all when i was a child. i lived in lorain, ohio, which was a steel town. it was full of immigrants, people from poland and mexico. there were people who came down from canada who had escaped. it was one high school. there was no segregation because there was only one high school, and everybody was pretty poor. a family lived next door and gave my mother recipes for cabbage rolls, and she gave them... it was really very different in the ‘30s in that northern part of ohio. it wasn't like that in the south. but as one notices, on sunday, you see the divisions. there were four black churches, nine catholic churches, the polish one, the czech one, the italians.

there were four black churches, nine catholic churches, the polish one, the czech one, the italians. then there were the protestants. there were two or three. on sundays, we went to our specific ethnic things, but otherwise, it was fully exchanged. but to answer the question about the feeling, it was very much family—oriented, because it was such a family of storytelling and singing that it was inescapable. it was participatory — that is to say, as a child, i had to re—tell those stories to other adults. the same story over and over again, but i was allowed to edit it, me and my sister. you could change it a little bit. you could recite it a little bit. but you were very much involved in that process of telling these stories that were pretty much horror stories about life as an african—american.

i mean, they were powerful and highly metaphorical, but that is really what was at the bottom of it. just tell me a little bit about your father's relationship with the white world as compared with your mother's. it was quite distinctly different. you have written about this very movingly in a series of essays that it seems to me a lot of how you grew to see the white world is influenced by understandably a combination of both. my father really hated all white people. he would not let them in the house. they would come to get the insurance payments or something, and they had to stand on the porch. he was born in georgia, and he went back every year to visit family there. my mother was born in alabama. she remembers the south like it was heaven or something. she thought picking okra

was a delightful little chore. she would say, "yes, we used to pick okra, "and we saw ghosts in the woods". so for her, it was like disney world or something. laughter. but she never, ever discriminated or looked at people racially. one at a time, she judged them, and would not tolerate racism or anti—white behaviour oi’ even comments from us. those were two really polar opposites in terms of responding to race. and ijust absorbed, i think, what was most helpful and creative and healthy for me — what i felt was that vacancy about our story, my story. i was a very avid reader, and the book wasn't there.

but if it had been, i think i probably wouldn't have been a writer at all, i would have remained a reader. i want to ask you about a short story you wrote called recitatif, in which two girls meet in an orphanage and encounter each other again throughout their lives. in the story, one is white and one is black, but the way you write the story, the reader never knows which one is white, and which one is black, and it occurs to me that that is something that has informed all of your writing, that you want people to see the characters that you have written about as people first and not as the colour of their skin. that was very important to me that recitatif...because i had all of the cultural clues, who worked where, but nothing about which one was black, because it is a language problem in writing, seriously.

i used to tell my students — there is an interesting line in one of the hemingway books, i can't remember... anyway, it doesn't matter. i'm old. but i remember the line. laughter. he says...he‘s in cuba. he says two men came toward him. one was cuban, one was black. maybe they were both cuban. but the black man has no home. he doesn't belong in cuba. he is outside of it. so i find in so much classical white literature, this use to which black people are put as different, you know, as separate.

and so i began carefully to try to figure out... even faulkner was the best example of not doing that. which is why he impressed me so much when i was a student and of course later. but the idea was to de—race the language. let's talk about beloved, which many view as your crowning achievement. it is the story of a woman who must live with the consequences of a particular event, and it is set in the aftermath of the emancipation of slavery. she is a runaway slave, and she makes a choice to do something devastating to her child. it was rooted in a true story, but story of margaret garner, and what i found really fascinating was that you make no judgement about what she did.

i want to ask you why you think that, as the writer, it was so important that you did not make a judgment that this woman would have preferred to have murdered her own children than to have them go back into slavery. yeah, i remember in the newspaper article where i first saw the story of margaret garner that the mother—in—law said that she couldn'tjudge her. i thought... everybody decided she was insane, since she killed her children. but she is very calm, very resolute. and i thought, "well, suppose my children, if i put myself "in that place, i could notjudge." i realised the only person who had the right tojudge her, and that would be the dead child. she would be the one to say, "well, i don't think that was a good idea," or, "i understand, ma".

but whatever it was, therefore beloved, shejudges or withholds oi’ does all those things in addition tojudge, but she just wants very much to be loved by her mother. you say that on the day you were told that you had won the nobel prize for literature in 1992 — i think it was given to you in 1994 you felt proud to be an american. the suggestion being that you were not before that. i wonder what it was then, that, apart from the honour of being given the nobel prize, what was it in your heart, in your soul, that made you think, "i'm part of this country when i wasn't before"?

i felt proud in a number of ways. i was a proud 0hioan. i was a proud female. there weren't a lot of females that had won that prize, you know. the other thing was that they give a great party. laughter. oh, that party was unbelievable. for days and days. so everything about it was fantastic. i don't think i have to encourage any of you to put your hands together and thank toni morrison. thank you.

it has felt more at terminal out there than the middle of august. —— autumnal. the reason is the strong and gusty winds that have been up on us and gusty winds that have been up on us today. those gales will continue across southern us today. those gales will continue across southern areas us today. those gales will continue across southern areas for the next few hours, yet the heavy downpours area few hours, yet the heavy downpours are a concern further north. strong went whipping in across southern areas, gas and excess of 60 mph around some of the coasts, further north we have the slow—moving bands of rain. continue to see gas of wind in excess of 60 mph in the midlands, southern england and wales, the midlands included. these are enhanced by sharp showers running through. further north the wind is not quite so strong, light across scotland, therefore the showers that come along a slow—moving. moving

into this evening, quite torrential downpours lasting for quite some time in areas across scotland, close to the area of low pressure. no wind to the area of low pressure. no wind to move them on. slow—moving showers for northern ireland, northern eglin, blustery wind, that weather front is persisting with rain, flooding for the west coast, m 7a, showers further south but given the strength of the went they are just rattling through. enhancing those wins. quite warm given that it is tropical air mixed in with this weather system. things are changing. starting to change in the north overnight as we pick up a northerly wind, which i'd you bring the cold air ina wind, which i'd you bring the cold air in a well enhance the rain so it just keeps falling in areas that have already seen severe flooding in recent weeks. the ground saturated, river levels high, some concern about that, 60—80 millimetres of rain between now and tomorrow morning, which were clearly and has the risk of flooding. again it

doesn't stop, this next area of rain developing through the course of the mower added looks set to hit southern areas of scotland into northern england, heavy showers to the south, the wind will have eased significantly. warmth to kick off in three showers, but vastly different feel to things across scotland, just because of the northerly wind setting in. the outlook, a rather u nsettled setting in. the outlook, a rather unsettled picture. cooler by day, certainly by night, plenty of showers or logger spells of rain, clearly we have a lot of weather warnings out today and tomorrow, all on the website, i will keep you informed as we go through the rest 00:28:38,762 --> 4294966103:13:29,430 of the afternoon.